Why does the UK not guarantee British citizens a certain number of days of paid work every year as agricultural labourers? The answer is because it industrialized long, long ago. It got rid of 'outdoor relief' and 'Workhouses'. It does, however, have cash benefits for poor people. The reason all countries try to move in this direction is because after the Agricultural Revolution came an Industrial Revolution. The proportion of the population engaged in agriculture must fall.
India has grown a lot in the last 20 years. It is obvious that its rural employment guarantee scheme must change. This is not 'the Guardian view', but it is the sensible view.
Few countries have attempted anything as ambitious as India’s rural jobs guarantee.
It was stupid. India needed to industrialize not to trap people in involuted agriculture. Still, corrupt, coalition, politics forced Manmohan to go down this foolish road.
Under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, any adult in the countryside who demanded work was entitled to a job on local public works within 15 days, failing which the government had to pay an unemployment allowance.
Did they actually get it? No. A parliamentary committee report found that across a five-year period from 2018-19 to November 2023, only about 3% of eligible workers actually received an unemployment allowance. But hardly any one was registered as eligible. Only ₹90,000 (£750) in total was released as "unemployment allowance" by various states for the entire financial year, a figure noted as deficient by the Economic Survey 2024.
Enacted in 2005, MGNREGA created the world’s most far-reaching legal right to employment.
Why not create a legal right to immortality? That way nobody would die.
It generates 2bn person-days of work a year for about 50m households.
What voters want is cash transfers because work done under the scheme is unproductive. The sum involved is about 125 pounds per household per year. This is only about ten percent of expenditure at the poverty line. Free rations, cooking gas etc. is more important. Top this up with cash transfers while saving money on admin and materials used to create the illusion of work being done.
Over half of all workers were women, and about 40% came from Dalit and tribal communities.
They would prefer cash transfers. That is what they will get. Still, both the Centre and the States can use this shitty act to shore up their support in the rural areas- i.e. enrich local bigwigs who start behaving in a feudal manner. That's not a good thing.
For a country where vast numbers rely on seasonal farm work, the scheme mattered.
What mattered was money. Give them money. Don't resort to the Victorian 'food for work' mishegoss.
It stabilised incomes, raised rural wages, expanded women’s bargaining power and reduced internal migration.
No. It empowered local 'notables'. It was corrupt. The rate of return on its projects was low or negative.
Households could demand up to 100 days of paid work at a statutory minimum wage, turning employment into an enforceable right.
No. If you don't get it or you do get it and don't get paid, you are in the same boat as thousands of Government employees whose salaries haven't been paid. Go to court by all means. The case will drag on for decades.
The World Bank derided it as a “barrier to development” in 2009 – but praised it as “stellar” five years later.
The World Bank had been chased out of the infrastructure building business in India in the Nineties by crazy 'activists' who operated on a global scale. They had learned to kowtow to the crazy leftists who 'occupy Wall Street'.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has however replaced this rights-based system
It was presented as such, but it was no such thing. Rights are meaningless without judicially enforceable remedies. But, because the legal system is dysfunctional and enforcement is discretionary, any such remedies are arbitrarily rationed.
MGNREGA was a centrally sponsored scheme under the Union Government's Ministry of Rural Development, with the central government bearing 100% of unskilled wage costs and 75% of material costs. Initially there was some notion that local panchayats would find good projects. They didn't. That's why the new scheme focuses on the supply side. Good projects get the green light. Shite doesn't. At any rate, that is the theory.with a centrally managed welfare scheme, VB-G RAM G, a shift opposed by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz
who is utterly ignorant of India. Admittedly, he is also ignorant of everywhere else, still the fact is only a bunch of racist cunts would hold the opinion that a White dude is more knowledgeable about Venezuela or India than the brown people who actually live there.
and the inequality scholar Thomas Piketty.
see above.
Mr Modi usually shrugs off critics.
No. He responds to them because he wants to win elections. But what the Guardian is doing isn't criticism. It is eating its own stinky shit. Modi is right to shrug off the criticism that he isn't eating enough of his own shit. This is because eating shit is evidence of mental fucking retardation.
This time, though, he may have overreached. As MGNREGA’s architect
that was Raghuvansh Prasad Singh of the RJD who was Minister of Rural Development in UPA1. He had a PhD in Math. Manmohan had to defer to him, because RJD had 24 seats, though he knew the Biharis would steal all the money.
Jean Drèze argues, the new plan centralises power while offloading responsibility.
Dreze knows money gets stolen. He won't admit this because then his one claim to fame is that he helped transfer money from poor brown working people to rich, corrupt, parasites whose sons and daughters get degrees from fancy foreign universities and acquire valuable real estate there.
The central government gains discretion over when and where the scheme applies, caps funding and shifts financial risk to Indian states.
How bizarre! Why is the Central Government not bankrupting itself? Why is it trying to balance the budget? Surely it should go in for hyper-inflation? As for 'financial risks'- they should be borne by those who undertake projects which they believe will be profitable- i.e. yield more revenue, or cut costs, for the State Government.
If the scheme is “switched off”, failure to provide work is no longer illegal.
It was never illegal.
Prof Drèze is right to say that this is “like providing a work guarantee without any guarantee that the guarantee applies”.
Which was true of the previous system and is true of every fucking guarantee including the guarantee to guarantee the guarantee of the guarantee.
The old system had its flaws: inefficiency, underfunding, corruption.
If a thing is flawed, the Guardian view is that you should stick with it.
But the answer was reform not repeal.
This is reform.
Poorer states, facing new liabilities, may simply ration access to avoid paying out.
That already happened. How fucking stupid are the cunts who write for the Guardian? The reason cash transfers are better is because the admin cost is minimal. The problem with MNREGA is that the cost of ensuring the thing isn't too fraudulent is high. Since richer states can afford better administration, they were able to get more money from the Centre for various anti-poverty programs. In the poorest places, disbursement was lowest precisely because of the expectation that money would be stolen which in turn meant nobody wanted to sign off on disbursement.
Remarkably, Mr Modi is attempting to prevail with arguments that have failed him before.
No. Everybody gets that cash transfers are better. That's what won the recent Bihar elections. The new law gives a soft landing for existing beneficiaries (i.e. corrupt coteries who, however, are vital for 'booth management' in rural areas) while giving room for rapid expansion of particular schemes- e.g. renewable energy- for which there are economies of scale (or a need to support indigenous manufacturing- e.g. solar panels).
His government passed in 2020 three “farm bills” that aimed to shift Indian agriculture away from a state-led administered-price system toward a more market-based model. They were repealed in 2021 after year-long protests.
Why? Modi forgot the role of the 'middlemen' (arhathiyas) in Punjab, Haryana & Western UP. The latter two were important for the BJP, but the bigger risk was for the party to be perceived as anti-farmer. Anyway, the laws were permissive and depended on the States for implementation. In other words, getting rid of them imposed no cost.
Farmers
Some farmers in the North West.
were furious that protections they relied on were taken away without consultation.
No. They said that they feared that this was the thin of the wedge and that at some future date their interests might suffer.
The odd thing was that it was Kejriwal who gained most from the protests.
Mr Modi miscalculated in thinking that farmers saw market “freedoms” as opportunities.
He thought that Sikhs going crazy would consolidate the Hindu vote. If it worked for Rajiv, why not for him? The answer is that lots of arhatiyas are Caste Hindus. You could get Dalit consolidation against the farmers but Congress- which did have a Dalit CM in Punjab- was too sclerotic to work this angle.
Repeating this with rural jobs seems foolhardy.
Not to Indians. We get that it is part and parcel of propaganda for 'double engine sarkar'- i.e. the advantage of having the BJP rule your State as well as the Centre. But propaganda is all it is.
When monsoons fail, employment guarantees become crisis buffers.
Monsoon failure has highly localized effects which demand ideographic interventions. This is best left to the District Administration. Adding layers of bureaucracy doesn't help. The best system was the British one where the District Collector had wide powers. Sadly, a corrupt political class has intermediated itself alongside shitty NGOs. Some three decades ago P.Sainath wrote a book titled 'Everybody loves a good drought'. He may have added 'everybody loves farmer's suicides or the plight of unemployed rural labourers'. This is because money could be stolen from such schemes.
Indian states such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra are drought-prone and electorally pivotal.
Drought can affect some part of virtually every district.
Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh vote in 2028 in regional polls; Maharashtra follows in 2029.
BJP will raise cash transfers to poor women before the elections.
A weak monsoon in 2026–27 would allow rural distress to build up under a limited and discretionary scheme.
Unless the BJP wants to get re-elected and provides relief under one or more of the plethora of available schemes. On the other hand, a sufficiently bad sequence of monsoons may cause the State to go off a fiscal cliff. The truly important entitlements- free food etc.- disappear. .
Climate shocks could translate into electoral judgments by polling day.
Only if Modi is stupid. But he isn't stupid. One way or another, money will be spent to buy votes with cash transfers. But you have to pay off corrupt coteries. That is what 'anti poverty' schemes are for.
Under the old system, job demand automatically expanded supply,
That was the theory, not the practice.
diffusing blame;
fuck blame. Politicians want credit.
under Mr Modi’s plans, the finger will point squarely at Delhi.
No. Delhi will come across like Santa Claus. But what matters is free food and cash transfers. With anything else, the blame falls on the local administration or village council.
Prof Drèze is backing grassroots protests,
He is Belgian. Also he is a weirdo. The urban Naxal rent-a-mob will come out in force- but they have no force and, in any case, will start demanding the declaration of war on Israel and America and so forth.
insisting the right to work still exists and must be honoured.
There is no right without an incentive compatible remedy. It isn't the case that 'right to life' means that Death has been abolished.
Its potency lies with female workers who learned, through MGNREGA, to claim wages and work – not charity.
They don't want work. They want cash transfers. So do British women. They aren't asking Sir Keir to give them 100 days work per year digging ditches.
As with the farm protests
which were about the arhathiyas. Why? The middle-men also arrange soft bank loans (which will get written off) and other benefits.
women’s presence turns technocratic disputes into moral reckonings.
Vaginas in Gaza created a 'moral reckoning' for Netanyahu. Venezuelan vaginas will force Trump to repatriate Maduro. Ayotallah Khameni is very frightened of Iranian vaginas. This will cause the fall of Islamist regime everywhere.
If work is denied because of Mr Modi’s new caps, discontent in the courts, states and streets could again align, as it did before the farm bills fell.
If work is denied, vaginas will take to the streets. Modi will fall. Trump too will fall if Kamala- who was denied work in the White House- unleashes her vagina. Liz Truss should have set her vagina loose on the City of London. That way, she would have remained P.M.
Why does the Guardian have such stupid and ignorant opinions on every subject under the Sun? Is it because it doesn't have to make a profit? It merely has to virtue signal while living in a fool's paradise. Modi doesn't have that luxury.
No comments:
Post a Comment